In recent years, Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) technologies have emerged as a fast-growing market. Among the various WLAN technologies, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.11 standard is a dominating technology and is frequently used for WLANs.
Client devices within WLANs communicate with access points to obtain access to one or more network resources. Access points are digital devices that may be communicatively coupled to one or more networks (e.g., Internet, an intranet, etc.). Access points may be directly connected to the one or more networks or connected via a controller. An access point, as referred to herein, may include but is not limited to a Wireless Access Point (WAP) that communicates wirelessly with devices using Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or related standards and that communicates with a wired network.
Access points transmit management frames and data frames to client devices, other access points, and/or any other type of device in a network. Management frames in IEEE 802.11 based WLANs include beacon frames which include information about a network. In one example, a beacon frame is conventionally broadcasted by an access point at a fixed frequency and fixed data transmission rate to announce the presence of one or more WLANs for client devices to find the one or more WLANs. In another example, a beacon frame is transmitted by an access point to announce information related to frames buffered at the access point.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.